Hedvig emerges from stealth!

I started off in a field of computer science called distributed systems. I was one of the initial co-inventors of Amazon Dynamo, which was the genesis of the entire NoSQL movement. I was at Amazon for three years and learned a lot about designing and operating large-scale distributed systems. Then I became one of Facebook's early employees and that's where I invented and built Apache Cassandra. It was the second NoSQL system I built.

I left Facebook with the experience of having designed, built, and operated two big systems in production environments at two of the largest Internet properties in the world.

It was in 2011 that I observed what was happening in virtualization and cloud. Despite great leaps forward in IT infrastructure, I felt that there had been no fundamental innovation in storage in the last decade. Emerging storage technologies were incremental innovations at best.

As virtualization became pervasive and people graduated to a cloud mentality, we started to see automation and self-provisioning capabilities across the data center. At the same time hardware had come a really long way. Flash and commodity infrastructure were cheap and reliable.

I saw the world of enterprise data centers striving to catch up with the world of Internet that I had come to know. So, with all of this on my mind, I decided to leave Facebook.

My goal was simple: Bring true distributed systems capabilities to storage. To make the power previously locked up in an Amazon, Facebook, or Google data center available to any enterprise at any scale.

My mantra was simple: Make things flexible. Data centers are complex. If AWS can provision assets in seconds for any application - and do that at the scale they operate at - then why can’t smaller organizations? If things are simple and flexible they can.

And finally, my vision was simple: Use the unique distributed systems skills I had accumulated that, if stitched together well, will disrupt a very big space.

That’s the genesis of Hedvig. That’s what we’re announcing today. It's a modern approach to software-defined storage (SDS).

Avinash Lakshman

Avinash Lakshman is the CEO & Founder of Hedvig. Before starting Hedvig, Avinash built two large distributed systems: Amazon Dynamo and Apache Cassandra. As the pioneer of NoSQL systems, Avinash is passionate about using distributed systems to disrupt a storage space that hasn't seen any real innovation over the last decade.